Between Research and Practice: The Connecting Power of Poetry

There was a connecting energy in the room that I had never experienced in a seminar before. It came partly from the emotional impact and lyrical aesthetics of the poems, from the presence of the poets and the stories they told. And it came partly from the workshop's themes and texts, which opened up a space where students could speak about themselves and share something personal about belonging, home, and Berlin. I experienced that space as open, empathetic, and appreciative of every story that was shared: as empowerment. Everyone listened, and through our stories we found ourselves, without any special effort, "on equal footing."

Experiencing this in a research seminar on artivism in the Afghan diaspora prior to this project, left a lasting impression on me and made me want to work with The Poetry Project and IAAW students. The Poetry Project (TPP) is an innovative literary dialogue project that accompanies young people with refugee backgrounds as they express their experiences through poems. I was encouraged in this by the feedback from the TPP poets, who found the exchange in a university context both inspiring and appreciative: the students took a keen interest in their poems and stories, and brought a deeper knowledge of the region, and sometimes even some Dari, to the encounters, discussions, and writing exercises.

From these shared, connecting, and empowering experiences, the idea of a collaborative poetics project was born, which ultimately led to the development of the research and dialogue project "ROOTS, PATHWAYS & TRACES – Poetic Dialogues between the Afghan Diaspora, Academia, and Civil Society." At its center are writing workshops and poetic dialogues in which collaborative multilingual literary texts emerge: about belonging and resilience (roots), migration (pathways), and memories (traces). As a form of artivism, these dialogues create a space where knowledge flows between civil society, academia, and the diaspora in every direction at once. For this, the project partnered with The Poetry Project e.V. and the Afghan association YAAR e.V., and, from the very beginning, involved students and doctoral researchers at the IAAW in conceptualizing and carrying out the project, for instance through student tutorials.

When the Research Region Becomes Home

When migrant and diasporic experiences and lifeworlds are no longer located far away in other regions but right on one's own doorstep, a different urgency arises to reflect on one's own role and positionality as a researcher. The illusion of analytical distance disappears, and the experience of being part of the social field of research oneself becomes more immediate.

My previous professional self-understanding as a regional studies scholar working in cultural anthropology was challenged when I began to do research with people from Afghanistan whose biographies are marked by displacement and experiences of racist discrimination, and who at the same time live, work, study, pay taxes, engage in civil society, and feel at home in Berlin. Suddenly the research region was Germany, my own home, and its struggle to find a viable post-migrant vision of society. It was no longer only about the Afghan diaspora in Germany, but about a holistic view of Germany as a country of immigration, about social cohesion, participation, democratic values, and the role of academia in this context.

This is exactly where the decolonial approach of researching "WITH rather than about" comes in. It holds great potential for learning from migrant and diasporic lifeworlds how coexistence and belonging can be negotiated in post-migrant society in Germany. In practice, the poetic dialogues are precisely such negotiation processes, which we do not merely observe but try out ourselves. We were inspired by the text on collaborative poetics by the artistic-collaborative research group Johnson et al. (Helen Johnson, Xander Macaulay-Rettino, Simon Banderob, Inara Lalani, Emily Carson-Apstein & Ellana Blacher (2020) A rose by any other name? Developing a method of collaborative poetics, Qualitative Research in Psychology, 17:4, 477-497, DOI: 10.1080/14780887.2018.1442762.): an approach that understands poetry at once as art, research method, and epistemic practice. Poetry becomes a form of shared storytelling, one that gives equal weight to everyone's personal experience and makes experiences of discrimination and exclusion visible.

From the TPP poets we learned that writing poetry opens new paths to the self. It allows us to reflect more consciously on our own positionality in research, and to bring it into our work more naturally. For the students, it became clearer how closely our research interests are tied to our own stories, and the topic of positionality lost its abstract character.

Research as Shared Knowledge Production

In practice, this means above all that the original research focus widens, and the project's attention shifts from the core research questions to the process of producing knowledge together. We spend a great deal of time reflecting again and again: What are we doing right now? Why is it unfolding this way? Does it feel right to everyone involved? This is where collaborative, participatory diaspora research becomes a truly responsible practice.

This also demands intensive conceptual work. Planning a public reading together makes it urgent to clarify what "collaborative" and "participation" actually mean, and how we can arrive at a shared understanding of those terms. Who takes on which role that evening, and why? Who speaks, about what, and for whom? After one public reading with a panel discussion, our plan was to read Hannah Arendt's texts on political participation together. Instead, we had an intense discussion about why we had not succeeded in holding a dialogue throughout that evening: what a dialogue actually is, what we mean by it, and where its limits lie. Processes like this take time, sometimes push the classic routes of academic learning into the background, and bring unexpected dynamics and conflicts with them. But we are learning to make room for them, and to understand dialogue as a process of learning.

One key moment for me was a reflection by a student member of the project: “It's not easy to suddenly do research together with the professor you know from various seminars.” It made clear that, when we talk about participation, we need to examine not only the unequal power relations between university and diaspora members, but also the power structures of the university that are present in the seminar room itself. This in turn raises the question of universities' responsibility to foster democracy and social participation.

Translation as the Foundation of Intercultural Dialogue

Negotiations like these also play out in language itself, in very practical ways. A collaborative, intercultural writing project like ours makes real demands: linguistic translation between everyone involved, a willingness on all sides to invest time and to patiently endure not understanding, and acts of translation that are not only linguistic but also cultural. This became especially clear at one of our public poetic dialogues, held at the premises of YAAR e.V. in the Sprengel-Kiez in Berlin-Wedding. To do justice to the evening's theme, "Languages of Belonging," and to our predominantly Dari-speaking audience, the event was held bilingually in Dari and German, with simultaneous interpretation by YAAR staff member David Amiri-Reible. This took twice as long and meant stretches of listening without understanding for everyone in the room. Remarkably, even though the evening ran long, everyone stayed until the end. A shared feeling of belonging and participation emerged: through being addressed and valued in one's own language, as well as through patiently enduring not understanding the language of the other participants.

For me, that evening stands for the lived experience of big words like participation, tolerance, and togetherness. Finding a shared language and formats of translation takes time, a resource that must in future be deliberately built into the design of collaborative research. We are currently putting this insight into practice in poem translations that IAAW students are producing together with the TPP poets. We also understand the process that leads to the German renderings of the poems as part of our poetic dialogues.

Time as a Resource: What the Freiräume Funding Made Possible and What Comes Next

A collaborative research and dialogue project takes up a great deal of time: to build close, trusting relationships with partners, to invest in shared processes of translation, and to shape the exchange into a common space for learning. The "Open Humboldt Freiräume" funding in the summer semester of 2026 gave me this time. Through the funding, various collaborative and participatory formats of poetic-scholarly exchange on migration, belonging, and coexistence in Berlin took shape. In public readings and panel discussions under the theme Berlin Belonging, in a student tutorial, and in writing workshops led by TPP poets, lyrical texts, conversations, and scholarly reflections emerged about home, estrangement, loss, memory, and connection.

The project ROOTS, PATHWAYS & TRACES will continue next semester and will be further developed in cooperation with the two main project partners, TPP and YAAR e.V., and with substantial support from the two student project partners, Hannah Flache and Emma-Moira Eschrich. Further episodes of the podcast series Goftogu – Dialogues between Academia, Art, and Activism are in the making, as are further thematic writing workshops and collaborative translations of poems from Dari. This form of collaborative poetics will be continued in the winter semester 2026/27 in a student tutorial at the IAAW. The digital knowledge repository "Co:Lab Afghan Diaspora Research," which is being developed in the Department of Transregional Central Asian Studies, also gives all participants the opportunity to continue the collaboration on an artistic or scholarly level beyond the funding period.

What we have learned most clearly along the way does not lie in the results, but in that long evening at YAAR e.V.: understanding begins only when we are willing to listen, and to endure our own not understanding for a while. It is moments like these that move something.

Author: Prof. Dr Manja Stephan; Editing and translation by: Marlene Lüdorff